SpaceX successfully launched its latest test flight of Starship on Sunday morning, marking a significant step for the most powerful rocket system ever built, which could one day take humans to the moon and Mars. SpaceX’s Most Ambitious Starship Test Yet.
The Super Heavy rocket booster, topped with the uncrewed Starship spacecraft, lifted off at 8:25 a.m. ET (7:25 a.m. CT) from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, during a 30-minute launch window that opened at 8 a.m. ET.
For the first time, this mission featured an ambitious attempt to guide the 232-foot (71-meter) rocket booster back to a massive landing platform after it burned through most of its fuel and separated from the Starship spacecraft. In a stunning display, the Super Heavy booster was successfully caught midair by a pair of enormous metal arms, known as “chopsticks,” designed by SpaceX for this precise purpose.
Meanwhile, the Starship spacecraft continued its journey, powered by its six onboard engines, before attempting a landing maneuver over the Indian Ocean. SpaceX does not expect to recover this upper part of the spacecraft.
Each milestone of this test flight is aimed at refining how SpaceX can one day recover and quickly reuse both Super Heavy boosters and Starship spacecraft for future missions. Reusability is key to SpaceX’s long-term goal of significantly reducing the time and cost of sending cargo—or even people—into Earth’s orbit and beyond.
In the future, SpaceX plans to use the Starship capsule to land NASA astronauts on the moon as early as 2026, as part of the Artemis III mission. The company has nearly $4 billion in government contracts to achieve this goal. Eventually, SpaceX hopes that Starship will be the vehicle that puts the first humans on Mars.
Pushing the envelope
The development of Starship has involved a series of increasingly complex test flights. It all started in 2019 with brief “hop” tests of a prototype known as “Starhopper,” which initially rose just inches off the ground. Since then, SpaceX has taken on bolder challenges, progressing to full-scale launches of the Starship capsule and Super Heavy booster.
The first integrated test flight of Starship and Super Heavy took place in April 2023. The goal of that launch was simply to get the massive 397-foot (121-meter) rocket off the ground, which it successfully did. However, the vehicle exploded minutes into flight over the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX is known for embracing fiery setbacks in the early stages of spacecraft development, viewing these failures as opportunities to quickly make design improvements that lead to better results.
With each launch, the company’s ambitions have grown. In June, the fourth test flight of SpaceX’s integrated campaign took place. Despite showing a badly scorched and wobbly wing during the webcast, both the booster and spacecraft survived reentry into Earth’s atmosphere and successfully executed touchdown maneuvers over the ocean—a major leap forward in their progress. SpaceX’s Most Ambitious Starship Test Yet.
Into Mechazilla’s arms
SpaceX took its testing a step further by successfully retrieving the Super Heavy booster after launch.
The ultimate goal is to recover and reuse both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft, but mastering booster recovery is a natural first step, as SpaceX has considerable experience in this area. The company perfected landing rocket boosters with its smaller Falcon 9 rocket, which has made soft landings on sea platforms or ground pads after over 330 launches. This reuse has significantly reduced costs, allowing SpaceX to dominate the rocket market.
However, Starship is a far more powerful and complex system. The Super Heavy booster, with 33 engines at its base—each more powerful than the nine used on the Falcon—produces about 10 times the thrust at liftoff.
Instead of using landing legs like those on the Falcon 9 booster, SpaceX designed a special tower to recover the Super Heavy booster, aiming to speed up the process.
This tower, nicknamed “Mechazilla” by CEO Elon Musk for its resemblance to a metallic Godzilla, is equipped with massive metal arms known as “chopsticks.” These arms are used to stack and move the boosters and spacecraft at the launch site before takeoff, and they’re designed to catch the vehicles midair as they return to Earth.
Musk envisions that the chopstick arms will eventually be able to place a rocket back on the launchpad within minutes of its return. Once refueled, the rocket could potentially be ready to take off again as soon as 30 minutes after landing, according to Musk in a June 5 interview.
The odds of Starship’s success
It’s an ambitious vision, and SpaceX is still fine-tuning the mechanics of the midair catch.
In a July interview posted on YouTube, Elon Musk admitted that SpaceX’s goal for this flight “sounds kind of insane,” but added that it “has a decent chance of working.” He noted, “We’re not breaking physics, so success is one of the possible outcomes here.”
According to SpaceX’s website, the Super Heavy booster was caught based on thousands of distinct vehicle and pad criteria being met. This included healthy systems on both the booster and tower, and a manual command from the mission’s Flight Director. SpaceX’s Most Ambitious Starship Test Yet.
If the attempt had been called off, the Super Heavy booster would have tried landing over the ocean instead. The catch occurred roughly seven minutes after launch, while the Starship spacecraft continued coasting for nearly an hour before making a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
During Starship’s fourth test flight in June, one major issue it encountered was the loss of heat shield tiles—thousands of small, black hexagons attached to the spacecraft’s exterior, designed to protect it from the intense heat during reentry. According to Elon Musk, the loss of a significant number of these tiles severely impacted the spacecraft’s ability to attempt a controlled landing. “Because of lost tiles, the forward flaps were so melted it was like trying to control it with little skeleton hands,” Musk explained. As a result, the vehicle ended up landing about 6 miles (9.7 kilometers) off its intended splashdown site in the ocean.
